Sharing Iranian Stories
Through Shadow Puppetry By Whitney Grace
Hamid Rahmanian behind the shadow screen. All photos courtesy of Hamid Rahmanian
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hadows have entertained us since our ancestors first noticed their dark outlines on cave walls and turned them into puppets, and of course any child with a flashlight is delighted to make silly hand shapes. However, as a storytelling method, a shadow’s complexity is belied by its surface simplicity. Filmmaker and animator Hamid Rahmanian is passionate about shadow puppetry and animation. He earned a degree in computer animation from Pratt Institute in 1994. Rahmanian doesn’t shy away from combating hatred, particularly related to his native Iran. Combining his love for misaligned media and Iranian culture, Rahmanian created the critically praised and award-winning stage show Feathers of Fire in collaboration with Larry Reed and ShadowLight Productions. Feathers of Fire is adapted from The Shahnameh (English translation, The Book of Kings), Iran’s contribution to world literature and an epic comparable
to the Odyssey, Ramayana, Beowulf, or the Epic of Gilgamesh. Written by 10th century poet Ferdowsi, The Shahnameh is a mythological history of Persia before the Muslim Conquest. The epic has the archetypes and themes that make it one of the best stories ever.
After immigrating to the United States, Rahmanian observed that many Americans were prejudiced toward Middle Easterners. He noticed that much of the prejudice was fear centered, because Americans were unfamiliar with Iranian history and culture.
Rahmanian recognized that greater America was unaware of the rich beauty in Iranian culture, so he brought a shining torch light to illuminate it. When cave dwellers were confronted with a reality different from everything they knew, they reacted in fear. Instead of reacting with anger, Rahmanian took the approach that Jim Henson used with Fraggle Rock and Aesop with his fables:
teaching through entertainment. He took his idea even further by combining the ancient epic with an entertainment medium older than recorded history: shadow puppetry. Among Iran’s surfeit of cultural treasures is a proud shadow puppetry heritage unknown to most Westerners. Westerners do love puppetry. Americans are obsessed with the medium in the form of a frog and pig, while Europeans are fond of their own beloved puppetry traditions. However, puppet shows are usually not the first entertainment choice of those in the West. It would be extraordinarily difficult for an Iranian-born American to inspire modern audiences with a shadow puppet show about an ancient Persian epic, unless they did something different. What did Rahmanian do? Inspired
by Walt Disney and Jim Henson, he innovated. Drawing on his background as an animator and gusto for modern technology, he created a brand-new type
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